For a stunningly succinct analysis of the role of technocrats, experts and bureaucrats in contemporary society, please read John Ralston Saul.

Citation: Seuss, Dr.: Batholomew And The Oobleck. New York: Random House, 1949.

“Beecher declared that men “who have been cast down from affluence to poverty should not grunt and grumble, but bear matters unflinchingly. They should never forget that they are men, even though they die of hunger. An Indian, uncivilized though he was, never flinched when fire was applied to his body. The manly way to meet misfortune is to go down boldly to poverty.” (Lyman Beecher was the Minister of the Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, and the Father of Harriet Beecher Stowe.)

Susan Jacoby: The Age of American Unreason. Random House; New York. 2008. pp. 73

We encourage you, our Reader, to go and have a look at our Definition For A New World Order: “Economy” and The Democracy,” regarding the Monstrous Reification of “The Economy.” Stealing the future is that much more reprehensible when for a generation we are sold the lie that we have an “economy” and that we have a future. We could have done something about it. This is the true hallmark of the con-man, or the insane demagogue. The delusion lasts long enough to ensure complete, irrecoverable desolation and emmiseration. “It is so much easier, so much safer politically, to simply say “You were the victim of a lie,” than to suggest that both voters and their elected representatives, in both parties, must shoulder much of the blame for their willingness to be deceived. It is easy to imagine the chorus of sneers from ignorant talking heads on cable news if a presidential candidate dared to use the word “ignorance” in public.”

Susan Jacoby: The Age of American Unreason. Random House; New York. 2008. pp. 144

When do we call this terrorism? The Kidnap. The Hostage. The Ransom. The Hijack. The Extortion. The flaming wreckage. The despoliation and ruination of innocents.

“They are Leaders.” (They have led us… where?)

“They are Experts.” (They are charlatans in phony wizard costumes.)

“They know what to do.” (They know what to do, all right. Again, and again…)

“They are skilled.” (They are skilled deceivers. They repeat the same colossal theft over and over again.) 

“They take risks. They must be compensated.” (What risk? The risk that they will take their criminal “compensation” and go to another corporation to extort criminal “compensation?” Or the “Public Sector” to steal from the “public?” The fuck they take risks.)

“It is a Competitive job market. They must be compensated commensurately, or they won’t do the job.” (“Competitive?” Like the “free markets?”)

“They are the best in the world.” (They are a unique breed, that’s for sure.)

“They won’t do it if we don’t pay them their millions upon millions.” (What the fuck do you mean, they “won’t do it?” They won’t extort hundred of millions of dollars from us if they don’t extort hundreds of millions of dollars from us? Again? They won’t hijack, plunder and utterly destroy the productive capacity of global enterprise and the livelihoods of the populace?)

“They earn it.” (They have deluded generations of us to believe that they “earn” profits from real growth of real capital in real productive activity. There are no profits. They “Keep” the (real) “Money.”)

“They bring (shareholder) value. It is they who bring value.” (“Value?” Just how do you “value” the automobile industry now? Your future financial security? Our collective national and global security? Any future ecosystemic continuity?)

“They create profit.” (They invent fictitious “profit.” Then they appropriate it and steal it. “Profits?” What profits? Where are they? Huh? Research and development? Innovation? Your retirement fund?)

“The Market establishes their value.” (“The Market.” “The Market?” The market of they and themselves? Or that there ol’ “Free Market” we’ve heard about?)

“Economic ingenuity produced all this good- and produces only good. And such good is a public good- of general and public benefit.” “If it was invented in the financial markets, it produced only profit (and not loss- or “risk”).” The catechism of Strange, Magical Beliefs: That “the value of Things is found in their Market.” That “It “worked.”” (“It” hijacked and killed any notion or residuum of any economic future for us all, and substituted a farcical tissue of invention.) That the “profits” “It” invented were money. (They still “have” the “money.”) That “It” must therefore be ingenious. (Oh, yeah. Like a hundred clever movie heists.) That “It” produces the highest and best social value. The Mystery and Magic of Neo-liberal Financial Instruments:

WE CONFLATE: fiction with “profit” with money with value and productivity and growth.

WE ADDUCE: productivity from growth.

WE ADDUCE: growth from profit.

WE ADDUCE: profit from fiction.

WE ADDUCE: that “It” works.

WE ADDUCE: That “It” is good.

WE ADDUCE: That “It” is good for all.

WE ADDUCE: That “It” is real. All Glory be to “It.” Amen. 

“There is an acute awareness that things do not find their worth just in the market valuation on a given day.”

The Nation 15 Dec. (Cite Edition and Volume) pp. 36. Thank goodness. Hey, Brother Executive, Can You Spare A Dime? Doesn’t this seem like a really stupid time to be standing there with your hand out? When everything is smashed: When the sandbox is full of excrement and putrescence and the toys are all broken: When they stand there, parroting their tired demands for extortionist lootings. Droning the old doctrines about unfettered capitalism and the freedom of the marketplace… Then, brother, they are deluded. They are deranged. They are insane.

Look around you. Look at what they have done, at what they have wrought. Have you not had enough? What further discrediting of delusional extremist fundamentalism could you possibly imagine? Could you conceivably want further evidence of this insanity? How can you… believe? Can you delude yourself that they are not responsible for this? How can they? They are lunatics. This is beyond daring and beyond careless greed. Anybody who will still stand there and tell you, True Believer, that they are magic and you should give them money, shouldn’t be trusted with their own shoes. We, the Editor, certainly don’t want you, dear Reader, to be standing anywhere near them. It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall. When everything has failed and the world is burning and the hostages are all dead… Isn’t that when we kill the terrorists? Don’t we drag them out by their hair and beat them to death with stones? Brother, doesn’t this seem like a really stupid time to be standing there with your hand out?

WHAT WOULDN’T YOU MAKE THEM DO?What Horrors Do They Commit …TO GET YOUR VOTE?

Our election spectacle suggests that we are seriously contemplating being “led” by some very questionable people. Their ideological compatriots are in office, but these particular individuals do not (yet) represent us.

But we submit that our behavior is, in itself, in deed and fact, a VERY BAD THING.

How do we reconcile our thinking, our beliefs, when people are betraying democratic principles and institutions to GET OUR VOTES? What straining and distortion of our reason is needed to so convince us? How do we understand ourselves as actors in a theoretically representative democracy when we require that power-seekers betray democracy so they can act IN YOUR NAME?

Peculiarly enough, some of us who imagine ourselves to be Very Good People will eagerly vote for people who will do Very Bad Things, in our names. We know that others will do harm in public office that we couldn’t ourselves do. We know that these are very great abuses that will do terrible damage. They will be done, without apparent hesitation or scruple, in YOUR NAME.

These people will do wrong just to get there- to get into these positions of power. Remember- they are doing them now. We refer you to our Essay titled What Wouldn’t You Do and dated 29 September 2008.

Imagine the fundamental dishonesty, perfidy and immorality of anyone who is not only able, but also willing to act, to don costume and make-up and join the stage in this set piece, to be powerful. This is a manner of deceit, distortion and perversion of meaning and reason that is far beyond what you or we might cook up. It is difficult to even describe, no? This is truly the Magic of the Wizards of Power.

We The People are unable to imagine ourselves doing such things. Yet, we resolutely vote for people who do. We believe in the Truth of what we do, in the name of democracy. Here, we argue that this is a very great transgression on our parts.

We are a hapless, foolish, disenfranchised and victimized people. We are seemingly sane people who apparently can’t imagine ourselves in positions of public trust. We vote for bad people. We empower and embolden the anti-democratic, the unethical and the evil.

But MUST these people lie and steal and abuse power in order to convince us that they should represent us? Think of our skepticism to “give” our votes to a candidate until they have proved to us that they are like the armies of others who have abused and imprisoned us. How can we imagine that they act in our interest?

This is the Great Magic of the heroic spectacle of two-party politics in the Age of Empire. We must believe that they are unlike us; that they are unrecognizable monsters we cannot conceivably identify with- nor they with us. They are so ethically removed from us that we cannot imagine being like them. We must believe that that they are callous tyrants. We must know that they will betray and impoverish us. And perversely we must KNOW, with the full weight of our hearts and our reason, that they, somehow, magically, rhetorically, polemically, but convincingly represent our interests. To “give” them our votes. But on this matter we refer you to our Essay entitled Wrong People. Wrong Ideas and dated 08 August, 2008.

No wonder those who appropriate our voices and our power are the astonishing prestidigitators of words that they are. It is no wonder that their hypocrisies are so transparent, the tissues of their lies so tawdry, and their contempt so apparent. It is no wonder that many of us can justify the way our “leaders” act in the world: killing and enslaving and impoverishing. Look what we do make them what they are.

Think of the distortion and straining of the idea of representative government we have described here. We, the Editors, have herniated something up here in our right frontal lobe –here- just thinking about it. Herniated. See? Look at that little bulge. What is the matter with our thinking when we actively endorse and empower the anti-democratic, who will abuse and injure US?

No wonder our understanding of and relationship to our world is so distorted and unsupportable. No wonder our beliefs about our self-interest are so bizarrely twisted. We are, after all, listening to what these frauds are saying to us, aren’t we? About who we are?

We rend asunder not only reason and common sense but any calculus of your interest or mine. This is our argument: we, the people, do something which may, in epistemological terms, be worse. We do unimaginable violence to the foundations of morality, ethics, accountability, community and civil commonwealth. We are the cause.

What is our accountability for this? What is our responsibility for their abuses of power and politics when WE have made them what they are? When they are compelled and obliged to lie and betray and steal and kill not only claim our voices and our names, but to GET US TO VOTE FOR THEM?

At this interlude we implore you, our Reader, to go and read an Irreproachable Quote, by Etienne de La Boetie, posted here among our Features.

Severely Deformed Characters: John Ralston Saul

“Falsification becomes an essential talent for the elected, and eagerness to be duped a characteristic for the citizen. This also suggests that only people with severely deformed characters will be able to rise to high office. The system can’t help but reward those whose primary talents are acting and punish those who are straightforward.”

John Ralston Saul: Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. New York, MacMillan; 1992
Pp 496

The term “liberal bias” is very sneaky.

“Liberal” and “conservative” have very different meanings. They really do imply and denote profoundly different orientations to our fellows and to our world. They work very differently because the beliefs and practices they entail are profoundly different. They shape and transform our relations and our planet in opposing ways.

To associate them together through the articulation of “bias” is an especially effective trick- because it works to contaminate, to degrade the “liberal,” through the unspoken (but true) implication that bias itself is bad.

Here’s a definition of bias from the Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition Copyright 1934 by G. C. Merriam. It is a substantial definition.

Bias n. ; pl BIASES
2. A temperamental inclination; propensity or prepossession toward an object or view, not leaving the mind indifferent; bent; tendency; prejudice.

“Bent” indeed. In common usage, a bias, as in a biased perspective, opinion or understanding, suggests a “skewing,” a distortion, a warping. Bent. A prejudicial preconception and conviction, unsupported by fact and probably unjust.

Think of racial bias. Or economic bias. Biases against the specific interests of a groups. A categorical judgment and demonization of a group “identity.” But “liberal bias?”

Suggesting a “liberal bias” to complement conservative biases suggests that the two words,  “liberal” and “conservative,” and their meanings, converge: that they have the same value, the same relevance, the same substance, and similar relative moral weight. It suggests that “liberal” and “conservative” have common or comparable commitments to values, to philosophical integrity and to intellectual honesty. It implies that the terms function the same way in public discourse, in language and meaning.  They don’t. Don’t be confused.

This is a deception, a perversion and theft of language. It contaminates the meaning and the accomplishments of ’the liberal project’ with the greasy and sordid language of greed and fraud.

The greatest trick of all is that it does so through the poisonous linkage of the word BIAS- a word that contaminates. It is especially poisonous because it has been tainted by the greed and meanness of a panoply of self-interested, money-grubbing, power-thieving “conservatives,” fundamentalists and sundry extremists of several stripes.

These are groups that ARE “biased.“ They are highly prejudicial and discriminatory. They are groups that hate. They are overtly antagonistic to the real rights, opportunities and interests of others who are unlike themselves.

We know bias is ugly and dishonest. Why? Because we know that biases toward the rich, toward big business, toward fundamentalisms and extremisms, in general toward the interests and agendas of the powerful and privileged, are deceptive, injurious and unjust. Taken in this meaning, bias is plain, bald prejudice and discrimination. That’s what it is, and it is mean and ugly.

It seems like the very definition of bias, doesn’t it? Muddy, tarted-up “ideology” underwrites open attacks on the enfranchisement of a particular group, based on some hypocritical fundamentalism or other. Often joined with real, emotional and visceral anger and hate, toward identifiable, specific individuals.  Obviously, the injustice and the cost to the victims is real, and the benefits in the conservation and extension of power to the ideologues are all too real. These are real appropriations of power and money. Otherwise the power-hungry and acquisitive political operatives and reactionary ideologues wouldn’t traffic in this stuff.  This is greed, and this materiality alone distinguishes it from the ‘liberal’. Money changes hands. Yes, bias is ugly. And biases and their victims are particular, personal, specific and plural.

The suggestion of “liberal bias” is clearly meant to be unsavory. Influence of the benefits of public good in pursuit of what we encode as an “agenda”-any “agenda-” is naughty and undemocratic, correct?

This dishonest usage paints liberalism, and liberality itself, as avaricious, acquisitive, filthy, greedy and dishonest- and somehow covertly,deliberately and deceptively against the common good. That nefarious Liberality has been caught thieving.

To be liberal, in honest contemporary usage, is a belief in, a passion for, a commitment to liberality.

The Liberal discourse is that of liberality, and inclusion, and consensuality, and collective interests. It is about equality of opportunity, social and economic justice, equality of rights, and access tp the public institutions of democracy and justice. It is about public goods in the public trust, and defending the disenfranchised… and, well, we know what it really is. We could look it up. If you care to dig up some working Definitions for a New World Order, please post them here. Seriously.

Let’s remember that these things are real. These are real beliefs and commitments about how we think of one another and how we treat one another- liberally. They have concrete policies associated with them, and they have real consequences for us real people. They matter.
Liberalism is a commitment to the exercise and appropriation of power to… what- distribute power? Diffuse power? Empower? Throw open the gates to the City of Power?

A liberal bias would be a skewing or prejudice toward these things. This is an inherent contradiction not only in terms, but of ideas. That makes it especially hard to untangle, and an especially effective kidnap-murder of a term of reference. But we can take it back.

Let’s remember too, that “conservatism” has real people, with real beliefs and real power and real interests and Real Money, associated with it. And real policies, real “think tanks” and “pundits” and operatives, and real, concrete consequences. Maybe you share the view that these are harmful, injurious and unjust. Maybe you see them as discriminatory, or racist, or greedy, or vicious, or hugely destructive and dangerous. Maybe you just see a massive, fraudulent rip-off of public goods, the common-wealth and the dignity and livelihoods of others. Maybe not. But remember that what is at stake here is real. That is the underlying fact of “conservatism.” Real money, and real power, are at stake. And this is a real theft of our language.

We know that the “biases” of the rich and powerful –their cynical exercises of power, the policies and practices they promote and institutionalize- make them more rich and powerful. “Conservative” interests are ‘biased’ toward specifics: the concrete, material enrichment of specific individuals. Toward the accumulation and preservation of actual money and real power for the already rich and powerful.

Bias is prejudicial. It prejudges. It prejudices your opportunities and interests, and mine.

Liberalism is not a bias but an idea. It is a Project. Like the Project of Democracy. Maybe not so separable, even. Yes? Maybe it is ideological, or even an “Ideology”. We hesitate to use the term, and enclose it in quotation marks, because it too has been stolen from us and rendered dangerous and destructive to public discourse. An “Ideology” might be biased, now, mightn’t it?

The “biases” of the poor and the excluded would be… laughable? Pathetic? Would… make them more rich and powerful? Would their biases be against the interests of the rich and powerful? What kind of fundamentalism is that, anyway? Hah. You call THAT an ideology? Shit, that’s just angry, poor, brown losers talking, people.

We can’t be biased toward some folks, now can we? Especially if they have some kind of, well, defining characteristic that would easily distinguish them, like skin color or poverty or “mineral wealth” or something. Now THAT would be bias.

Liberalism is inclusion, the full expression of every voice and every interest and every truth and every experience of the world.

“Liberal bias” prejudices… equality of opportunity. It is predisposed toward… fairness. It is biased against… bias. It is, precisely, an opposition against bias! It is not-bias. It is anti-bias! Oh, and bias is anti-democratic. And to invent (and harbor and abet) the term “liberal bias” is dishonest and anti-democratic. It is a Theft of Our Language. Please don’t suffocate the clarity of your thinking by using this term, or terms like it.

The language of inclusion, of populism, of liberality simply cannot be skewed or biased in this way. It is fundamentally straightening, aligning, “truing” in its meaning and in the policies and beliefs that it attends.

Clever, huh? Using the sordid taint of conservative bias to execrate liberality.

Sick fuckers. Next Week: “Liberal Agenda.”